Home (A Quick Guide to Forced Displacement)
“No human being should be deprived of his metaxu, that is to say of those relative
and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul
and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.”
– Simone Weil
and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul
and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.”
– Simone Weil
Let us rest a little.
There is much to take in here. After a long process of disintegration,
rootedness. The life instinct, exceeding bounds, gives off sparks
before it breaks free
and burns itself out
in a flashover.
To break free
will take a lifetime.
A lifetime is a type of flammable cladding
anxious to ingest the oxygen in cavity walls.
The blaze burrows through at length
and eats away at it,
as a blaze would.
Memory is the conductor
as well as the meeting place. The air’s circular presence
feels orchestrated by some vague, ambient compulsion
toward a symmetry that precedes intention. At the sharp end of the passage-
way
were they a substance
in a vessel being filled
the same memories would turn up the self-
same passageway, again--
they’d continue, the self repeat,
visible only in retrospect—
you left to see how far you’d come--
looking back, you were a navigational hyperlink,
collapsed, light at nightfall the final sight to mark your progress,
all initial and ulterior installments of escapement born out of a mere change of direction.
Flux.
Reflux.
[It’s why you are always starting over.]
Run motions of repetition to reach an entry point.
Foster, for what it’s worth,
an image,
a destination…
You feel you are changing yet again. You’d like to ask
what dead book fiction was used to shroud, to mask everyone’s spirit
of discernment so completely,
is it true there isn’t a valve to shut off the flow of that blue smoke in here
the outlet pressure’s going to exceed 1000 kPa and someone may choke to death
before they iron out eventual bugs and safety flaws
and add new self-correcting features,
plus that piece
that has been lodged in you
internalized
like a compression field around a nexus of events might,
and why not, reveal a trace in a case of evidence without clues
as from a swift underwater explosion
during which for a subject to be transformed
it must be stowed at the center of its vulnerability,
it, the subject,
and then propelled high into the air
so as to reflect upside down
in the flashing eye-ball in the sky
the seeing of events as image,
as destination,
not the kind one feels confined to but a harbor of pursuit,
a transplant of the will to believe no less desirous than habitual,
habitually a size too large.
Because the first act of war is feeling small.
Hard to know when to stop, having arrived into the world head first,
anonymously, the next place beside the last, so few crossing rafts.
Micro-Machinist
Back inside the ring-shaped tunnel fluorescents trace a pale, lavender tint.
Memory flashes spark the place like lightning:
a series of configurations of reflective acts
without reflection
gathered in the walls themselves, not in the mind,
along floorboards and hallways, in the slow accretion of breath
on windowpanes.
A baseline unreality dances with the real from the confinement of the naming self.
Confinement has a long memory,
like prayer—interiors fetched from dream and visions stay silent
because all speech
is deceptive
and imperfect,
retrieved with that smoky fidelity
peculiar to sleep, returned altered, its dimensions suspect, corners warped
slightly away from the truth.
But prayer isn’t so much asking as it is just being still.
The sound of the town waking up to life
matched to the waking town’s
unique sound print
reveals
a voice signal
unaccounted for.
The signal is a wave flowing through our bodies.
When sounded clear it streams right through, lifesize, sonorant howl hardened into everyday acoustics, the guards cashing in each time it runs across
free to continue plaiting
fresh data strands unimpeded, ununiform with the near-
daylight sweep
so that we should access information
at a higher speed, then become it.
Our thoughts are slow-navigating afterthoughts
tethered to events idly dissolving behind them.
Everything takes place before us as if on a screen we watch,
memories pin us back every .4 seconds generating miles and miles of industrious erosion.
Nothing that we choose sits still.
An investigation has been launched, is now ongoing, persists
in the mirage configured/
reconfigured
in the eyes of statues
we can’t escape around the room,
a kind of watching that predates the watcher,
each figure engaged in a meditation whose object had been forgotten
but whose form remained intact.
Saying, how is the thing felt
when there’s no getting through in order to begin to feel at all?
Insofar as the nervous mind supplies the system’s orchestra,
life awaits the big homecoming
cheering on
nothing but survival training
with a deathwish: the music crumbles the alveoli on either side of the recruit’s heart--
Having come across the late familiar missing of the soul, his own private micro-
machinist, all that commands him does not exist.
Memory flashes spark the place like lightning:
a series of configurations of reflective acts
without reflection
gathered in the walls themselves, not in the mind,
along floorboards and hallways, in the slow accretion of breath
on windowpanes.
A baseline unreality dances with the real from the confinement of the naming self.
Confinement has a long memory,
like prayer—interiors fetched from dream and visions stay silent
because all speech
is deceptive
and imperfect,
retrieved with that smoky fidelity
peculiar to sleep, returned altered, its dimensions suspect, corners warped
slightly away from the truth.
But prayer isn’t so much asking as it is just being still.
The sound of the town waking up to life
matched to the waking town’s
unique sound print
reveals
a voice signal
unaccounted for.
The signal is a wave flowing through our bodies.
When sounded clear it streams right through, lifesize, sonorant howl hardened into everyday acoustics, the guards cashing in each time it runs across
free to continue plaiting
fresh data strands unimpeded, ununiform with the near-
daylight sweep
so that we should access information
at a higher speed, then become it.
Our thoughts are slow-navigating afterthoughts
tethered to events idly dissolving behind them.
Everything takes place before us as if on a screen we watch,
memories pin us back every .4 seconds generating miles and miles of industrious erosion.
Nothing that we choose sits still.
An investigation has been launched, is now ongoing, persists
in the mirage configured/
reconfigured
in the eyes of statues
we can’t escape around the room,
a kind of watching that predates the watcher,
each figure engaged in a meditation whose object had been forgotten
but whose form remained intact.
Saying, how is the thing felt
when there’s no getting through in order to begin to feel at all?
Insofar as the nervous mind supplies the system’s orchestra,
life awaits the big homecoming
cheering on
nothing but survival training
with a deathwish: the music crumbles the alveoli on either side of the recruit’s heart--
Having come across the late familiar missing of the soul, his own private micro-
machinist, all that commands him does not exist.
Click & Connect
At night tricks of light sleep at dark angles,
unlived edges blend in
and blow the design out of scale.
The heart feels like waves gently rock you in the middle of the sea.
Its action extends
and contracts
the somatic parameters
of an interbeing
turned inward searching,
sets for it a rhythm…
Less and less conscious,
the rhythm is scalloped, rationalized
same as a destructive impulse.
Proceed by connecting the following statements:
You don’t yet KNOW yourself.
You drink down nature so she spits you back OUT.
You remain deeply UNHAPPY.
unlived edges blend in
and blow the design out of scale.
The heart feels like waves gently rock you in the middle of the sea.
Its action extends
and contracts
the somatic parameters
of an interbeing
turned inward searching,
sets for it a rhythm…
Less and less conscious,
the rhythm is scalloped, rationalized
same as a destructive impulse.
Proceed by connecting the following statements:
You don’t yet KNOW yourself.
You drink down nature so she spits you back OUT.
You remain deeply UNHAPPY.
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Daniel Carden Nemo is a poet, translator, and photographer. His work has appeared in Magma Poetry, RHINO, Full Stop, Off the Coast, and elsewhere.
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